Tribes 2
Tribes 2 is a game of which you may have heard, but probably not. There are hunrdeds of thousands of accounts in the database; each corresponds to a purchase of the game. And yet, the company that made it was dismantled shortly after its release. The awesomeness known as Tribes 2 was the inspiration for every FPS made after 2001, including the Battlefield series... and yet, the Incredible Machine known as Dynamix has fallen to meet the needs of the beast known as Vivendi. Tribes 2 promised "Team Combat on an Epic Scale" and supports 60+ players in a single game. This legacy of the genre lives on... in the dreams of every child and the hearts of the wicked. Tribes 2 is freeware, technically. Before November 2008, it could only be seriously played if you had a CD-key, and there were none left. Many who had a CD-key were also unable to play; the game converted keys into personalized accounts, and many had forgotten their information. If you go searching around the in-game browser, you can find thousands upon thousands of players who had just "moved on". You could always have tried sending an e-mail over to tribes2accounts@sierra.com to get your account information reset, but don't count on it. With the shutdown of the Tribes 2 Master Server in November 2008, the powers-that-be have decided that the game is over, permanently. However, it lives on through unauthorized patches to the game executable to remove a restriction on Class B IP address usage when the game is run in LAN mode, as well as a new master server that does little more than list the bunch of games that are being played. One major side-effect of using this setup is that Tribes 2 was never designed to have any sort of validation or any IP address bans in LAN mode. Because of this, virtually anyone can join a server at any time with any name they choose, and they have free reign to just completely stop the game. There are solutions to this in the works. Long-standing Facts of Tribes 2 * Spinfusor is the Greatest. Weapon. Ever. It is a precision weapon of pure ownage. It is a weapon that fires explosive discs. In a game filled with jetpacks, splash damage is not as strong as in other games. Therefore, it is obvious that the l33test way to hit someone in the air is to shoot them with this gun. This is known as hitting a "Mid Air" shot, abbreviated "MA". * The only thing that every Tribes player agrees upon is that MAs are l33t. Some hate super-speed skiing. Some hate vehicles. Still others hate depth. But MAs are always l33t. Always. * Upon the game's release, many players hated the loss of high-speed skiing, a technique that would allow personnel to outrun most vehicles (these are in Tribes 1 terms; vehicles became much faster in Tribes 2). The classical sentiment of Starsiege Tribes players would continue until late 2002, when a patch was released with the "Classic" mod; this mod brought back high-speed skiing. While personnel vehicles such as the Shrike are still faster than skiing, the old-school players got what they wanted. * Back at the peak of Tribes 2 activity, a server designated for broadband-only once reached 128 players. In a single server. It was likely housing the most insane Tribes 2 Base games ever, but very few people knew the password. It may have had something to do with the GameSpy network. * In the Spring of 2004, Fileplanet was given 5,000 CD-keys from VUGames. They were distributed freely to people who had FilePlanet accounts. Fileplanet ran out of keys on the inside of 48 hours. That's over 100 keys distributed in every hour! * In the Summer of 2004, Tribes Vengeance was released. Hundreds of reasons could be listed of why Tribes 2 is a much better game. * Tribes 2 is pretty much dead at this point, having gone to the n00bs (who should have no right to exist). Category:Video Games